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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18163 |
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| _version_ | 1866913140734689280 |
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| author | Ranade, Tej Sanibh |
| author_facet | Ranade, Tej Sanibh |
| contents | Hallucination correction is not a one-direction problem. We show that intermediate layers are neither uniformly more truthful than final layers nor uniformly less trustworthy. Yet hallucination reduction is usually instantiated through one fixed intervention form: contrast one layer against another, steer along a truthfulness direction, or defer to external evidence. This framing is structurally incomplete. Cross-layer factual evidence does not evolve uniformly: in some failures truthful support is present internally and later suppressed, whereas in others candidate competition remains genuinely multi-directional across depth, so no single signed scalar family is generally sufficient. We introduce Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction (TRACE), a deterministic, training-free algorithm which corrects hallucinations at inference time by deriving both the corrective layer and the appropriate correction operator from each input's cross-layer candidate trajectory inside the LLM's own forward pass. Under one frozen hyperparameter setting, TRACE selects among scalar reversal, earlier-state recovery, and candidate-space correction using only model-internal evidence. Evaluated as a single universal algorithm across 15 models, 8 model families, and 3 factuality benchmarks, TRACE improves every evaluation cell, yielding mean gains of +12.26 MC1 points and +8.65 MC2-style points with no regressions, with gains reaching +47.20 MC1 and +43.38 MC2-style points. The method uses no labels, retrieval, pretraining, finetuning, or per-model calibration. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18163 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | TRACE: Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction Ranade, Tej Sanibh Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language I.2.7 Hallucination correction is not a one-direction problem. We show that intermediate layers are neither uniformly more truthful than final layers nor uniformly less trustworthy. Yet hallucination reduction is usually instantiated through one fixed intervention form: contrast one layer against another, steer along a truthfulness direction, or defer to external evidence. This framing is structurally incomplete. Cross-layer factual evidence does not evolve uniformly: in some failures truthful support is present internally and later suppressed, whereas in others candidate competition remains genuinely multi-directional across depth, so no single signed scalar family is generally sufficient. We introduce Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction (TRACE), a deterministic, training-free algorithm which corrects hallucinations at inference time by deriving both the corrective layer and the appropriate correction operator from each input's cross-layer candidate trajectory inside the LLM's own forward pass. Under one frozen hyperparameter setting, TRACE selects among scalar reversal, earlier-state recovery, and candidate-space correction using only model-internal evidence. Evaluated as a single universal algorithm across 15 models, 8 model families, and 3 factuality benchmarks, TRACE improves every evaluation cell, yielding mean gains of +12.26 MC1 points and +8.65 MC2-style points with no regressions, with gains reaching +47.20 MC1 and +43.38 MC2-style points. The method uses no labels, retrieval, pretraining, finetuning, or per-model calibration. |
| title | TRACE: Trajectory Correction from Cross-layer Evidence for Hallucination Reduction |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language I.2.7 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18163 |